Thursday, September 18, 2008

Oh, You Know What We're Still Talking About

The financial situation remains the big news, overshadowing the surreal, Kafkaesque presidential campaign. I believe one of the candidates is going to have to go full out and actually wake up one morning as a cockroach before focus gets fully shifted back to that rather than the slow-motion meltdown on Wall Street. The Dow dropped another 450 points on Wednesday, pushing it to about 800 points down since Monday. Jim Cramer on Nightline tonight suggested that maybe it would've been down 1,500 points had the Fed not stepped in to bail out A.I.G. Krugman points out how the current market resembles the Titanic:

A thought I had today: as I understand it, when the Titanic hit that iceberg, at first the crew didn’t think it was so bad. The ship’s hull was divided into watertight compartments, and not enough of them had been ripped open to sink the ship. But the flooding from the initial hole tipped the ship, and the compartments were open at the top, so that compartments that hadn’t been ripped open by the impact of the iceberg started filling up, tipping the ship even more, flooding more compartments …

Because I'm apparently in a masochistic mood this evening, I checked out what James Howard Kunstler's had to say lately--he's been predicting a financial crisis of this sort for a few years, now. His most recent post suggests we refer to the Republicans as the party that wrecked America from now on.

Will the wrecking continue on Thursday? Speculation is that Washington Mutual is the next to find a deal or go down. We'll wait and see.